In the Long Run We're All Mice

Chocolate cake in 5 minutes

The Underground History of American Education - looks like it could be interesting reading, although I don't have time to actually read it at the moment.

Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn't as smart as it thinks

Disconnecting Distraction

Low cost laptop cheat sheet. Personally I like the look of the Asus 901, although it's a bit expensive. And not actually available yet.

(Sourced from Roger)

I found stickK in the Economist this week. It seems like an excellent idea - motivate yourself by contracting to pay out if you don't meet personal goals.

Thunderbird is leaving the mozilla project

A depressing article on the state of GCSE Physics courses

javi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript

I've created a separate running blog at A Story of Doom.

"Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML"

Scribd - it's like youtube for text

• Novelist accidentally burns down office
• Multimedia Hipster PDA upgrade now available in more colours
• Boost AJAX performance using local storage
• Moving a 100 year old church

• retrofone - specialists in obsolete mobile phones. Tried to order a 7110 from them and my card was rejected, their contact email address bounced.
• thinkgeek retro phone handset
• Hulger retro handsets
• iwantoneofthose retro telephones
• Mayfair retro phone with buttons
• Dial Retro Telephones
• the home of vintage and rare mobile phones

Sign this petition to promote the use of Open Document Format within the UK government.

Threading is hard

How to Hire Guillaume Ports or, why the new Microsoft Open Office XML standard is impossible for anyone but Microsoft to implement.

via slashdot

I just found out about the amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. If I read it right, it's essentially rentable virtual machines, similar to the Sun Grid service.

At the moment, it's a beta, which appears to be full. If and when I get an account, I'll be trying it out, and possibly moving etla.org related stuff onto it.

The Windows Shutdown Crapfest

Probably coming rather late to the party, I just found bileblog, which appears to be nothing but complaints about various bits of java this guy disapproves of.

I think it's wonderful.

The CEO of Sun asks "Why bother with datacenters at all?".

I've complained about this before, but I still really hate websites that provide no obvious (and sometimes no unobvious) way to contact the people behind the site.

The latest one was a Thunderbird plugin that appeared to provide no way to contact the author via email or whatever. (I could've commented on the site, but the issue I wanted to contact them about was that the commenting didn't seem to work).

So I've got an account on 43things.com. A handy site for tracking your goals and discussing them with people. Only there's one problem. I've not used it in a while and forgotten my username.

There appears to be no way to recover it, and, what's worse, they're so web 2.0 they've skipped old-fashioned things like a contact email address. And you can't access most of the site to look for your data without creating an account, which I would be happy to do, if I didn't already have one.

Update: They also don't support standard addresses like webmaster@43things.com.